Bøker av Katie Peterson

Peterson unfurls the quotidian fabric of our lives, patterned with the difficulties of language and this moment.Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson's Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to, and from, the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal-one a natural weather event, the other an aftereffect of the West's drought-caused fires-but they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke subsume the poet and reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to connect. She writes, "I've been speaking about it at a distance. / Now I want to talk about its thickness. / A person could get killed in here."The collection moves through three sections: First, the poet follows her local fog's cyclical journey of descent and dispersion; second, in a sort of pastoral interlude, she travels widely, almost erratically, to the California desert, the greater world, and ancient history; finally, she descends into the enclosed space of the household, and the increased confinement and intimacy of raising a child during the pandemic. Peterson unfolds the small moments that make up our lives and reveals the truths contained within them, and her poems capture the lyricism of our daily rhythms-the interruptions, dialogues, and epiphanies.

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson‿s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California‿with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn‿t wish for? A narrator‿s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.â€?

The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. In this book, the title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth - a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account.